Ah! YES! A little swipe at Chomsky here smile emoticon Marvelous
guy but he was far too much into the "Universal
language/universal ideas/universal mental states". I mean, it
was USEFUL for this theories but considering that no language
machine in the brain was ever discovered or will be.. it kinda
calls his theories as anything but PRACTICAL but not entirely
accurate at all, but certainly quite precise... missing the
target completely but doing a very good job at what it does.
Still, it's dominance in linguistics overshadowing all other is
due for an overhaul, considering advances in cognitive science
since his early days of attempting to computerize grammar
production. Not that's it's not USEFUL what he's done and what's
come out of it for the past 50 years, but we can definitely do
better.... "Henry Hiz (1967:74) pointed out, criticizing
Chomsky, there is an important question that must be answered
linguistically. 'How does it happen that an ambiguous sentence
ceases to be ambiguous when placed in the context of other
sentences?' This book provides a partial answer. I further agree
with Hiz when he says, 'But it should be easier to explain why
we assign such-and-such a structure to a sentence by pointing
out how this sentence changes the readings of neighboring
sentences than by referring to innate universal ideas and mental
reality' (1967:74)."
